Content area
Full Text
Dr. Robert L. Van de Castle passed away on January 29, 2014, at the ripe age of 86. To me he was a very memorable man. I met him first at the Spring Review Meeting at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (Institute for Parapsychology) in Durham, North Carolina during the year that I spent there in 1969-1970. Rhine held review meetings twice a year and invited a dinner speaker from outside. This time the speaker was Robert (Bob) Van de Castle, who had in the mid-50s spent some time with Rhine at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. There he investigated personality correlates of PK performance and was a research assistant to Gaither Pratt in his project for the military involving homing behavior of pigeons.
After Bob's talk at the review meeting, we got into a conversation. This conversation had a decisive effect on my life, for which I will always be grateful. He invited me to join a 1-year internship program in clinical psychology that was being established at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He also guaranteed me time to work on my doctoral dissertation that I was writing with Professor Hans Bender in Freiburg, Germany. That was the begining of a long friendship. Whenever I visited Charlottesville in the ensuing years I always made it a point of seeing Bob and to spend some time with him.
Bob was born in Rochester, New York, on November 16, 1927, as the son of Omar Van de Castle (translates to "Omar from the castle"), who was born in Belgium, and a Canadian mother. He studied at the Universities of Syracuse and Missouri and obtained his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina in 1959. A turning point in Bob's life was his pionering work with Calvin Hall at his Institute of Dream Studies in Miami, Florida. Their joint book The Content Analysis of Dreams (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966) became a classic on quantitative research on dreams. It established norms and revealed prominent differences in the content of dreams between men and women, just to mention one of their findings.